Advertising

When it comes to blogging, you will find an endless debate about whether or not there should be any advertising on such a site. I’ll tell you this. When you start a new blog and suddenly an advertiser is offering you $50 to place a link on your site somewhere or $100 to place a banner ad, it’s hard to turn that cash away. You now have a chance to make money online and of course you’re going to be excited!

Every blogger needs to tackle this topic on their own and decide how much advertising, if any, works for them. Yes, the money is tempting, but I’ve seen far too many bloggers who begin accepting as many advertising deals as they can only to lose their audience completely, simply because readers don’t want to see a site loaded with ads. Then, once your readers are gone, the advertising offers will stop coming and any other chance you have of earning money through your site most often goes out the window with them.

On this site, I made a decision when I first started to not accept any advertising for the first two years and I stuck to that.

These days, I’ve decided to accept minimal advertising here on the blog, usually in the form a small banner ad in the sidebar for a company/service/website that I have used or tested out myself and that I believe is indeed useful for travelers. I don’t place any sponsored posts on this site at all but I might, on occasion, add a short blurb at the end of a post promoting something that, again, I truly believe is really worth checking out.

The reality is that if I accepted all of the advertising offers that come into my inbox each day at the moment, I could probably earn $3000+ per month in advertising alone. But I don’t. As I said, I turn away 95% of those offers and as a result, I usually earn just a small amount of ‘pocket cash’ instead. The thing is that I really want all of you to stick around this site and to continue being a part of this community, so there’s no way I’m going to plaster ads all over the place and try to squeeze out as much advertising income as I can. I’m sure that’s not what you want to see and therefore, it won’t happen.